Monday, October 19, 2009

So. Been busy, mostly working on the Family Story that was meant to be a pre-nano novella and now shows signs of wanting to keep going and becoming something Big. Naturally. I've no idea how long it will be at present.

Nanowise, the YA will be titled Shadows of Home. The trick will be keeping it YA and maybe doing a follow-up to it, depending on how it goes. After nano, I'm undecided. I have many, many projects from this year I can fix/continue, but the writing-group edited Roadside Attractions at the End of the World is waving at me again. I suspect the second draft will bear almost no resemblance to the first, since I'll be ditching most of the comedic-for-its-sake aspects and making it a far darker story overall. Which means tossing the aliens out the window and having Jesse's GF interact with him. I scratched out a few notes regarding overall goals, and I think the first two chapters will remain roughly the same, event-wise, but a lot of the over the top aspects of the later chapters will be discarded.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

I was thinking about the Story so far. As it stands, Darnell is mostly reactive. He's tossed into situations and acts to solve them. By the standard of who is sets the actual plots in motion and gets things rolling, the antagonists fit the bill. The main character is, at present, almost the antagonist.

The antagonist is partially responsible for the plot, definitely responsible for moving it forward. That Darnell doesn't know this is only good to a point. Be interesting to see where this goes.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”